


Rather late for me

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: White Boots - Noel Streatfeild
Genre: Breakfast, Domesticity, Established Relationship, F/F, Ficlet, Flirting, Fluff, Ice Skating, Post-Canon, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-06 01:23:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11590098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: At the 1990 World Figure Skating Championships, compulsory figures were skated for the last time. Lalla thinks about what might have been.





	Rather late for me

_11 March, 1990_

Lalla folded _The Times_ back on itself at the sports pages, took her spectacles off, and observed, 'Sexual intercourse began in nineteen seventy-three, Which was rather late for me.'

' _Sixty_ -three, surely?' Harriet said, buttering her toast. 'Though I seem to remember that you and I discovered it before that.'

Remembering Paris, Lalla grinned. 'Well,' she said, passing the paper across the table, 'it scans better than _Compulsory figures were cut down to thirty per cent of the overall score in nineteen seventy three, Which was rather late for me._ And now the beasts won't have to do them at all. Don't get butter on that. I want to frame it.'

'Oh, I see,' Harriet laughed. 'Miss Lalla Moore would have won a whole lot of championships if she hadn't had to do those dull figures.'

Lalla said, 'Miss Harriet Johnson would never have got an Olympic medal if the free skating had counted for anything more than thirty per cent.'

'And yet it did, and so she did.' Over their decades together, Harriet had learned to give as good as she got. 'I don't know why I put up with you.'

'It's my solemn duty to keep you from getting big-headed,' Lalla said, with a straight face. 'The British public couldn't cope if you were anything other than modest and sweet-natured.'

'The British public doesn't care,' Harriet retorted.

'Well, I do,' Lalla said.

'You don't.'

'Don't I?' Lalla thought about it. 'If you assume that I'd never have been good at figures, and you'd never have been good at free skating, then we could never have been competitive in the same discipline at the same time. And if I was young enough to be competing now then I'd be far too young for you. Which I wouldn't care about, but you would.'

'What if they'd changed the rules in nineteen sixty-three, then?' Harriet suggested. Lalla was pleased to see that she was blushing.

'A fat lot of good that would have been, when I'd given up on the idea of amateur competition in 'fifty-one. You know that as well as I do. What if I'd been ten years younger? Then you'd never have skated and we'd never have met. Stop trying to be nice.'

Harriet looked speculatively at the last piece of toast. 'I've got to be nice, for the sake of you and the British public. You said so.'

'You have it,' Lalla said, and pushed the toast rack towards her.

'I wasn't going to ask for it.'

'I know. You can have the toast. And an Olympic medal. I don't care, so long as I've got you.'

'You soppy thing,' Harriet said fondly, and passed the newspaper back to her. 'Now who's being nice?'

**Author's Note:**

> Lalla is mangling Philip Larkin's [Annus Mirabilis](https://allpoetry.com/Annus-Mirabilis).


End file.
